Stephan Packard

2015 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize winner

Stephan Packard received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for his work in the area of Media Cultural Studies.

Dr. Stephan Packard qualified with work on comic research. Among other things, he examines representations of the body, transmedial narrative strategies, the Appropriation of history, the treatment of politics and ideology, and the basic semiotics of comics.

His work on the transmedial Fiction theory and the cultural construction of virtuality are also reflected in the Freiburg Research Training Group “Factual and Fictional Narrative”. In recent years, Packard’s research has focused on phenomena of media control: in addition to censorship in the narrower sense, this includes, for example, state and commercial surveillance, propaganda, participation in digital networks, security discourses, copyright and exploitation rights, and other aspects of the controversial design of communication.

In Freiburg, Packard is involved in the establishment of the Institute 2 for Media Cultural Studies, newly founded in 2010, and the bachelor’s program of the same name, as well as in the preparation of the new master’s program in Media Cultural Studies, which is scheduled to enroll students for the first time in 2015.

Stephan Packard, born 1978, comes from Munich. He studied general and comparative literature, modern German literature and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. In 2004, he received his doctorate there with a dissertation on “Anatomy of the Comic: Psychosemiotic Media Analysis”. Since 2010 he has been working at the University of Freiburg, where he holds the assistant professorship for Media Cultural Studies. Currently Packard is writing his habilitation on “Sensitive Signs”. He is editor of the journal “Mediale Kontrolle unter Beobachtung” and co-editor of “Medienobservationen”. He is also chairman of the Society for Comic Research (ComFor) e.V.